The coffee giant suffered computer problems on Friday afternoon just after 4 p.m. PST that shut down its point-of-sale systems across the nation and forced the company to give away free coffee and tea.

Update (5:45 p.m.): Starbucks has acknowledged the outage in a statement, saying that it was caused by a “daily system refresh,” and says that the issue also affects Evolution Fresh and Teavana locations.

We are aware of the point of sale register outage at company-operated Starbucks stores in the U.S. and Canada. We are actively working to resolve the outage and our stores will remain open and continue to serve our customers. The outage was caused by a failure during a daily system refresh. We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience or confusion and will update this statement once systems are back online. This outage also effects our Evolution Fresh and Teavana stores.

Update (7:10 p.m.): Starbucks changed their statement from noting that “our stores will remain open” to “our stores that have not already closed for the evening are closing early.”

Taylor Soper is GeekWire's managing editor, responsible for coordinating the newsroom, planning coverage, and editing stories. A native of Portland, Ore., and graduate of the University of Washington, he was previously a GeekWire staff reporter, covering beats including startups and sports technology. Follow him @taylor_soper and email taylor@geekwire.com.